Shawn Brackbill - Press image of the Debo Band.
Speaking on the phone from his front porch in Boston, Danny Mekonnen’s words halt when five cardboard boxes arrive at the door.
“My records from Sub Pop just showed up!” Mekonnen says. “My mind is blown. That’s amazing!” Then to the delivery dude: “Yeah, Mekonnen. I’ve been waiting for this.”
(Courtesy of Sub Pop Records) - Cover art for Debo Band's self-titled album.
For a lifetime, really. The 31-year-old bandleader’s group, Debo Band, has been playing a propulsive brand of Ethiopian jazz on Boston’s underground rock circuit for seven years. The group will finally release its debut album Tuesday — a mix of traditional songs and originals being peddled by Next Ambiance, a subsidiary of Sub Pop, the label that first signed Nirvana, the Shins and other indie-turned-really-famous rock groups. (To support the album, Debo Band will visit U Street Music Hallnext Saturday.)
But Mekonnen’s musical journey can be traced across decades, across continents and across formats — from cassettes, to CDs, to MP3s, to these five boxes of shrink-wrapped vinyl, a medium that 21st-century music enthusiasts have saved from extinction.
Born in Sudan to Ethiopian refugees, Mekonnen grew up in Dallas, where he took up the saxophone. His middle school teachers gave him recordings from Miles Davis and John Coltrane, the CD booklets crammed with liner notes that he would read over and over. The music didn’t sound too different from the Ethiopian jazz his parents had dubbed onto blank cassettes and would play around the house — but American jazz had a story.
“It occurred to me in middle school that my parents were listening to this music and there was saxophone all over it,” Mekonnen says. “When I became a teenager and started asking my mom and dad for more context, they just didn’t have it. . . . But me, growing up with all that jazz information, reading all the liner notes by Nat Hentoff and Ira Gitler, I cared about all the history and detail.”
He didn’t find it until 2004, when he moved to Boston and audited classes at Berklee College of Music, the school where Ethio-jazz great Mulatu Astatke once studied. In Boston, Mekonnen joined an Ethiopian student association whose members hipped him to Ethiopiques, a popular series of compilation albums featuring Ethiopian jazz from the ’60s and ’70s. The CD booklets were brimming with the data that Mekonnen couldn’t glean from his parents’ Maxell cassettes. And the discs were filled with revelatory music from what many consider to be the golden age of Ethiopian song.
The rush of answers posed a bigger question for Mekonnen: “If you have a golden age, what is the music that comes after it?”
Mekonnen persuaded the student association’s president, Bruck Tesfaye, to perform with him at a talent show in 2005. Tesfaye would eventually become Debo Band’s lead singer. Later, Mekonnen recruited musicians from local post-punk and klezmer groups who lived in his neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. He began transposing Ethiopian songs into arrangements for non-Ethiopian instruments: violin, accordion and sousaphone. It all felt natural. “We were a community of these Jamaica Plain post-punk circus performers with an interest in the culture,” Mekonnen says.
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